• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • To be fair to Loblaws, I’ve never seen them change prices with these mid-day, so they’re not engaged in “surge pricing” that I’ve heard of. (I haven’t been to Loblaws since the start of the boycott, but I don’t expect it’s changed.)

    But I do wonder about the legality of that; right now, if the price at the till doesn’t match the item price, you get the first one free and the rest at the marked price (up to $10 items; above that it’s $10 off the marked price for the first item). But my impression is that policy is from Loblaws signing some sort of grocery code ages ago when scanners came in, essentially to assure consumers that they wouldn’t be scammed by scanners ringing up items at higher prices than advertised. I don’t think that is legally mandated.

    So, then, what happens if the price changes between when you put it in your cart and when you arrive at the till? Anyone engaging in surge pricing where the timing isn’t clearly marked in advance is going to get into a lot of trouble with consumer backlash, at the very least, but I hope it’s illegal, too.


  • The biggest thing that stood out to me was the mismatch between revenue and spending at different levels of government. 90% of spending with only 50% of tax revenue for regional government compared to 10% spending with 50% for the central government. I suppose that’s the mechanism they’re using to centrally manage the economy, by controlling fund transfers to lower levels of government?

    Including personal debt and corporate debt, this will also put China above 300% net debt to GDP. That seems really high, but I couldn’t easily find equivalent values for other countries to compare against. Canada has 100% consumer debt to GDP, 107% government debt to GDP, and corporate debt of $2 trillion / $3 trillion GDP is about 67%. (And I think Canada is considered over-leveraged compared to peer countries).

    It will be interesting to see how this plays out.


  • This seems like it might work really well. We’ve evolved to be social creatures, and internalizing the emotions of others is literally baked into our DNA (mirror neurons), so filtering out the emotional “noise” from customers seems, to me, like a brilliant way to improve the working conditions for call centre workers.

    It’s not like you can’t also tell the emotional tone of the caller based on the words they’re saying, and the call centre employees will know that voices are being changed.

    Also, I’m not so sure about reporting on anonymous Redditor comments as the basis for journalism. I know why it’s done, but I’d rather hear what a trained psychologist has to say about this, y’know?




  • I didn’t like summers or winters where I used to live, so I moved to somewhere where I like both seasons. Then moved again to somewhere that I love all four seasons.

    But I get what you’re saying; you’re describing the summers of my childhood. Hot and humid so you feel like you need a cold shower within 5 minutes of walking outside. Sticky by day, swarmed by mosquitos at night.

    But you lost me at the sand bit. I love the beach and ocean when it’s like 10-30°C out. Colder and hotter are okay, too, but not as nice.



  • In Canada, I’ve never bothered with a VPN. Nobody in Canada has ever been successfully sued for torrent downloading of media, and BC courts have thrown out mass John Doe cases as a waste of the legal system’s time.

    Even if it does go to court, there’s a principal in Canadian law that damages can be at most three times the value of the good (for punitive damages). For BluRay that’s, what, $50? They don’t want to go all the way to a judgement to set the legal precedent of a $150 judgement.

    Even if courts go beyond treble damages, there’s a maximum fine of $5000 for non-commercial infringement. Even that isn’t with their legal costs to pursue.

    So non-commercial piracy is de facto legal in Canada.

    (IANAL, this is not legal advice.)


  • Really interesting avenue of research; who’d have thought that discounting future value, as a concept, would come from clergy in a tenuous political and financial position with the Reformation and the start of inflation.

    I’m not an economic history expert by any stretch, but isn’t the 1600s the early start of the industrial revolution? Was the industrial revolution the cause of inflation? That would make sense, since it would be a major break in the value of capital in the short term to increase profits in the long term.




  • I don’t think that’s an issue. Downloading a partial is a problem on private trackers since there are so few users, but on a public tracker, someone downloading a partial is just making the swarm a bit more robust: they are sharing connections details to other users in the swarm and are able to partially seed part of the content.

    Hit & run torrent users are the bigger problem; they add nothing to the ecosystem. But, for example, if there’s a “complete early roms for all systems nointro unzipped” torrent, and someone only downloads and seeds the SNES section, then the swarm gets the benefit of someone sharing that section of the content.

    You could even get a situation where there are no “seeds” but 100% availability, with different people sharing different sections.

    I’m not fully looped in to why Anna’s Archive did what they did, but their massive 1TB+ torrent zips are pretty useless for most purposes. I’d be happy to download a partial and seed books in, say, a particular genre, but I’m not going to seed a partial of a massive zip file that’s useless to me without the full archive.


  • I have a lot of devices, but I rarely use most of them.

    1. My desktop is my main device for all my work from home. Work desktop for work at the office.
    2. My work laptop only gets used for client visits.
    3. My personal laptop only gets used when I need a second mobile device for work and Zooming with my family (to bring to where my kiddos are set up playing).
    4. My wife’s work laptop is her main work machine and her personal laptop is our evening TV.
    5. My Android phone is my ADHD dopamine machine most of the time. Some light work use.
    6. My gaming is almost exclusively on my Steam Deck (but I’m working on getting a WiFi mesh network so I can stream from my desktop to my Deck). Used nightly in bed.
    7. My 8 y.o. daughter’s tablet is an audiobook machine, some edutainment apps, and sleep sounds machine. Occasionally a screen for shows/art video tutorials.
    8. My 6 y.o son’s tablet is mostly podcasts and sleep sounds.
    9. My DSi is my wife’s Tetris machine.

    TL;DR: I mostly use my desktop for work and Deck/phone for entertainment. My laptops see use a few times/month when I’m on the road for work or Zooming with family and basically never in between. But we have a lot of devices that have specific use cases for different members of my family.